Unless otherwise indicated herein, the materials described in this section are not prior art to the claims in the present application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Peer-to-peer (P2P) and client-server models are two types of frequently used data exchange models. In P2P computing, a distributed application architecture partitions tasks or content between peers, where peers may be equally privileged participants in processing the applications. The peers may make a portion of their resources, including, for example, disk storage space or network bandwidth, available to the other peers in the network. P2P computing may not need direct coordination from a central server. P2P computing differs from the client-server model, where workloads may be partitioned between servers and clients. Servers and clients communicate over a computer network on separate hardware, yet the server and client may reside in the same system. A client may not share any of its resources and may not initiate communication with the server.